Anonymous wrote:If you have young kids, you want to know the history of the dog and if dog was properly socialized. Especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with a dog.

We wanted a shelter dog, but realized with a young kid and first time owning a dog as an adult, we didn’t want the risk. It was worth it to buy a family friendly breed.

We adopted a rescue dog when DD was 5 years old. He was the best pet ever. I miss him every day 😢

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, I volunteer with Big Fluffy Dog Rescue. We do adopt to people with young children, so please consider us. It’s a pretty large organization that places lots of dogs, so you can find pretty much any kind of dog (despite the name), in any age range. We have even started getting BMDs and doodles.

The best way to ‘window shop’ is to check the FB group, ‘Available Dogs from Big Fluffy Fog Rescue’. We also profile at least one dog a day, on the main FB page.

Thank you for your work! We adopted a Big Fluffy Dog and he is the absolute best.

I am so happy to hear that! I hope your adoption experience with us was a good one. Sometimes things fall through the crack, but by and large, we try to turn applications around quickly.

PPs talking about Pit %. I have numerous friends with pit bulls and mixes. With the exception of one, none have been human aggressive. That one, was half Malinois, and spent the first 8 months of her life stuck in a crate, so had some issues to overcome. The one dog that I was absolutely certain was a pit bull, was my SIL's dog. She turned out to be Lab/Husky/Chow/bunch of things instead. Dog selective, but great with people.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you aren’t ok with any percentage pit bull you need to buy a dog from a breeder. Nearly all rescues have some amount of pit in them and you have no way to tell that without running a dna test.

+1. We just got the DNA test back from our rescue and she is 20% pit.

Our Lucky Dog rescue came back 7% pit. She looks like a hound. I don't consider that enough pit DNA to be any risk. We met her at a PetSmart event and she's been an excellent family pet. I think you can choose a rescue that doesn't look at all like a pit with some confidence.

Don't assume that just because you get a dog from a rescue that you know what you're getting. My coworker's designer doodle is obsessed with chewing on her kitchen cabinets to the extent that they now all need to be replaced. They've spend a fortune on training, but she goes for the cabinets the moment you turn your back. Her beautiful kitchen in her $2m house is a mess and the dog cannot ever be left unattended.

As another anecdote, my father got a purebred yellow lab puppy from a breeder. The dog is now 130 lbs and the size of a black bear. It's the biggest lab you've ever seen. He was expecting a dog in the 60-80 lb range but his lab is double that size and really too much for a senior who can get knocked over.

Why wouldn’t she just keep the dog out of the kitchen? Baby gates work wonders.

OP, City Dogs has some dogs that might be good for you.

https://www.citydogsrescuedc.org/adoptable-dogs.html

For those commenting about low % of pit genetics, there are two factors - the behavioral and the physical. Both together can be lethal. But if your 20% pit has the body and jaws of a hound, even if it snaps and goes crazy, chances are it won't do the same kind of damage a full pit could do. If it attacked someone or something, you could probably pry it off. To me, this puts it back into the category of "any dog that could attack and wound someone but probably not kill."

What scares me about pits more than other dogs is that even grown men can't stop them if something goes wrong. And despite that, you have all these petite women wearing flip flops walking two pits while saying that they're just the sweetest things that would never hurt a fly.

IMO, no one should have a pet that they can't literally and physically handle.

OP, check out Project Second Chance, an organization that rescues homeless and abandoned dogs form Puerto Rico. I believe they perform DNA tests, and have had numerous dogs that don't have any pit in them. We have two old ladies we adopted from them, and they're the sweetest creatures you've ever seen.

https://www.project-secondchance.org/

https://goldenhearts.co/golden-retriever-rescue-virginia/

Good luck!

Anonymous wrote:If you have young kids, you want to know the history of the dog and if dog was properly socialized. Especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with a dog.

We wanted a shelter dog, but realized with a young kid and first time owning a dog as an adult, we didn’t want the risk. It was worth it to buy a family friendly breed.

This is a good point. In most cases you’re going to be better off with a very young mixed breed puppy that you can raise and train yourself than an adult dog with unknown trauma in the past. Puppies are a lot of work, but it’s worth it in the long run.

If you have young kids, you want to know the history of the dog and if dog was properly socialized. Especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with a dog.

We wanted a shelter dog, but realized with a young kid and first time owning a dog as an adult, we didn’t want the risk. It was worth it to buy a family friendly breed.

I foster for one of the rescues mentioned here.

Recently I fostered a little of rat terrier/pittbull terrier mixes. They were docile and trainable, even as a group. Many dogs you get from rescues, despite not looking like pitts, could potentially have pittbull genes, so you'll have to determine whether you're comfortable with any admixture of pitt and if so, how much.

There's a whole other conversation about whether it's sufficient for the dog to not have the pitt jaws, which were bred to never let go, and exert 242 pounds of pressure per square inch, or whether pitts have innately aggressive personalities (which I don't believe, personally). And if the former is your concern, ***then you need to also avoid any dog that has a jaw structure with the strength similar to a pittbull's***: German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Bulldogs, and Mastiffs, Chow Chows, Belgian Malinois, Dobermans, and Boxers. Labrador Retrievers also have a strong bite, but they are the American family dog par excellence, so people don't want to believe it...

Anonymous wrote:IME rescues won’t adopt to people with toddlers. It’s dumb, but true.

You need to be persistent at the shelter. Just keep showing up and/or obsessively checking the website. Pre-pandemic showing up was definitely the way to go and it may be again because you catch dogs before they hit the website.

Don’t write off a pit MIX. At a certain point it’s just a mutt.

Plenty of rescues allow toddlers. I've adopted from Big Fluffy and Wolf Trap with toddlers in the house. I would recommend both, particularly Wolf Trap as it can be hard to meet the dogs from Big Fluffy since they are spread out geographically. Wolf Trap is mostly puppies though.

Anonymous wrote:Our friends adult daughter ran the local pitbull rescue for years. Known as a dog lover, these friends repeatedly tried to get us to adopt a pitbull rescue. I went to one of their daughter's rescue fairs. These dogs were not safe. The friends adopted two. The two dogs got loose and went on a killing spree. Killed several llamas, chickens, and other dogs in one night. The couple quickly sold their home & moved back to Texas.

Once pitbulls associate with another dog & get the pack mentality, it will be a killing spree if they get loose.

We put up a double fence on our acre to keep the friends pitbulls from getting in to kill our dogs. Every single day for about 2 years they tried. The friends who were retired thought that it was cute. We didn't want to insult them so we just installed a double fence to protect our dogs.

Please keep any minor child away from pitbulls. It happens so fast that there is nothing that one can do to stop the vicious attack.

Just curious. How high were the fences and how far apart were they spaced? If they kept pits out for 2 years it must be an effective arrangement.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you aren’t ok with any percentage pit bull you need to buy a dog from a breeder. Nearly all rescues have some amount of pit in them and you have no way to tell that without running a dna test.

+1. We just got the DNA test back from our rescue and she is 20% pit.

Our Lucky Dog rescue came back 7% pit. She looks like a hound. I don't consider that enough pit DNA to be any risk. We met her at a PetSmart event and she's been an excellent family pet. I think you can choose a rescue that doesn't look at all like a pit with some confidence.

Don't assume that just because you get a dog from a rescue that you know what you're getting. My coworker's designer doodle is obsessed with chewing on her kitchen cabinets to the extent that they now all need to be replaced. They've spend a fortune on training, but she goes for the cabinets the moment you turn your back. Her beautiful kitchen in her $2m house is a mess and the dog cannot ever be left unattended.

As another anecdote, my father got a purebred yellow lab puppy from a breeder. The dog is now 130 lbs and the size of a black bear. It's the biggest lab you've ever seen. He was expecting a dog in the 60-80 lb range but his lab is double that size and really too much for a senior who can get knocked over.

I rescued in 2011 and basically just walked in and walked out with my dog. When I tried to rescue in 2021 I applied everywhere for a year and could get nowhere so I bought a dog and my puppy is the bestest. This is likely my last dog so glad I am able to raise her from a puppy.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you aren’t ok with any percentage pit bull you need to buy a dog from a breeder. Nearly all rescues have some amount of pit in them and you have no way to tell that without running a dna test.

+1. We just got the DNA test back from our rescue and she is 20% pit.

On the other hand, we have two rescue beagles who are very clearly 100% beagle. I never even questioned whether they had any percentage of pit (or other breed, for that matter).